Rwandan journalist sentenced to one year in jail

Nairobi, November
15, 2012--An appellate court in Rwanda should overturn the prison
sentence handed to the editor of a private weekly on Wednesday, the Committee
to Protect Journalists said today. CPJ also urges authorities to release
Stanley Gatera, editor of the Kinyarwandan-language paper Umusingi, pending his planned appeal.

The Gasabo
Intermediate Court in the capital, Kigali, sentenced Gatera, 22, to a one-year
jail term and fines of 30,000 Rwandan francs (US$50) for inciting divisionism
and gender discrimination in an opinion column he published in Umusingi
in June, according to local journalists and news
reports. The state prosecutor said in court that the article broke the
country's laws about referring to ethnic identities, local journalists told
CPJ. The Rwandan penal code includes crimes that carry prison terms for
individuals who speak too provocatively about ethnicity, news
reports said.

The article, called
"Shangazi" (Dear Aunt), suggested that men may regret marrying a Tutsi woman
solely for her beauty, according to CPJ's review of a translated copy of the
article. Police released a statement saying
they arrested Gatera on August 1 after receiving complaints from women's
groups.

Gatera, who defended
himself in court, said that the paper had run an apology from him in a
subsequent issue, local journalists told CPJ. But police in the statement called
it a "denial of wrongdoing."

The journalist is being
held at Kimironko Prison in Kigali and plans to appeal the sentence, local
journalists said.

"Readers may have
been offended by this column, but that does not mean Stanley Gatera should be
put in prison," said CPJ East Africa Consultant Tom Rhodes. "We urge the courts
to release him immediately pending appeal, and to overturn the disproportionate
penalties against him."

Umusingi has been targeted in the past. In February 2011, the newspaper's website
was temporarily
blocked in Rwanda after it published an interview with a dissident Rwandan
general in South Africa. The paper's founder and former managing director, Nelson
Gatsimbazi, fled the country in August 2011 after being told of his
impending arrest on charges of divisionism based on a complaint filed by
another journalist in 2008, local journalists told CPJ. In December 2010, Gatsimbazi
was accused by the presidential security adviser of working with "enemies of
the state," according to news
reports.